


And She Thrived

by spirrum



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Kidfic, family fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 18:38:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3260207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spirrum/pseuds/spirrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They name her Calliope, for she's very much her mother's daughter, but she's his, too, and her stories will last as long as his own, if not longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And She Thrived

**Author's Note:**

> I love doing kidlet collabs, and this is one I've been working on with the lovely Raefton over on tumblr (whose art is almost as perfect as she is). It's the product of our mutual love of Varric/Cassandra, and so we give you our cub, Calliope Antonia Pentaghast (Tethras?), cutest half-dwarf that ever did live in our collective imaginations.

([Before reading, have a look at Rae's art of the cub, so you can see how utterly adorable she is](http://spirrum.tumblr.com/post/109626533642/raedoodles-behold-calliope-cub-antonia))

.

She's four when she first asks the question – “Daddy, can you tell me the story of when Mama saved the world from dragons?”

Cassandra groans, but she doesn't even try to interject with an 'that's  _not_  what happened' because it's already a lost cause, and her daughter is too much her father to even consider a remotely realistic alternative to the tale that's been going around for decades.

At the centre of her attention as he's wont to be with his tricks and tales, Varric sits her on his knee, and recounts the story of a young, fierce (and beautiful and inherently stubborn, of course) Nevarran Princess who single-handedly defeated a dragon and earned the favour of a noble Queen. It's not even close to the truth and he knows it as well as Cassandra does, but his daughter's wonder is such a bright and genuine thing, and so not even her mother has the heart to tell her otherwise.

When she's five she knows the tale by heart, and tells it to any who will listen – and those who don't necessarily want to, but it's a hard task, being at the mercy of those eyes, large and dark in her round face. She talks so fast she can barely catch her breath between the words, and she'll climb atop tables before her mother can herd her back into her chair ("Calliope Antonia,  _do not make me come up there_ "), her feet almost as quick as her tongue.

By the time she's six she's started adding her own details – there were ten dragons, and they were all girl dragons (which are the most dangerous dragons,  _everyone_  knows that), and Mama had a very big sword and she was fearless (the kind of fearless she is when she removes cobwebs from above the bed - the ones Daddy can't reach because Daddy is a dwarf and dwarves don't get to be very tall).

When she's seven, the apples of her cheeks are round with her clever smiles and her embellishments are vaster still – there's a whole army of dragons now, and Mama was riding a  _griffon_ –

“Like a Grey Warden! Oh, I'd like to be a Warden, can I be a Warden when I grow up?”

“ _No_ ,” they say in unison, in agreement of this if very little else, and she pouts and it's weeks before she'll stop asking for one for a pet. The carved rocking griffon Cassandra had reluctantly accepted on her daughter's birth becomes an idol, and oh, she should wring Blackwall's neck for putting the thought of the Wardens into her head.  

In the end Varric produces a kitten, a scruffy, hissing little thing – “From an old friend” – and Cassandra won't let him off the hook for  _that_ , very much her daughter's mother in her stubborn persistence, but Varric knows how to keep his secrets, even from his wife, and so Blondie lives to see another day. 

She's nine when she picks up her first sword – a blunt, wooden practice-sword that's entirely too long for her. Her mother is wary at the thought of her learning so early, but Varric knows the stubbornness that runs in his daughter's veins and is, not surprisingly, the first to relent.

“Cub, if you want to learn, I see no problem.”

Her mother takes some convincing, but she's got her father's charms, and so it's a short affair before there's a smaller wooden sword constantly at her hip, and she spends her afternoons hacking away at the practice dummies Cassandra has made for her (of a shorter height, and not so sturdy that they'll give her too much trouble, but still sturdy  _enough_ , because she's not just anyone's daughter). Griffon slinks at her heels, a constant shadow at his young Mistress' side, and hisses his warnings when others approach. Like her mother, she is more brute force than finesse, and throws her weight into her movements with a vigour that has her dead asleep before Varric even gets past the first sentence of her usual bedtime story.

The knowledge of her growth sits like an itch, but it's the inevitability of life, and they watch her age with the old apprehension that is the fate of all parents, but also with undeniable fondness.

She can't become a Seeker like her mother, for her father's blood runs stronger than her appearance suggests, but that doesn't stop her from following in her footsteps. By the time she's passed her second decade she's already made a name for herself, and the day she's no longer 'Seeker Pentaghast's half-dwarf daughter' is the day she begins to embellish the stories of her own deeds.

“You created this,” Cassandra says one day, when the number of darkspawn her daughter has allegedly slain has suddenly turned from a handful to well over a hundred.

Varric only grins. “Oh, I'm pretty sure I remember there being two of us participating in  _that_  little venture.”

She chucks her plate at him, and he ducks and laughs all the way out of the kitchen, and the cub buries her face in her hands because "Maker, Daddy, could you please  _not?"_

She's not one to sit still, and the world can never be truly big enough for a heart like hers, and whenever she leaves Cassandra is there to see her off; to offer well-known words ("and _yes,_  I know, you've told me a thousand times, I'll be careful, I always am") and to watch until she's a speck in the distance.

“She'll be back before you know it,” Varric tells her, and she doesn't call him a liar because if it is a lie it's one she'll willingly believe, and when he tugs at her fretting hands she comes back inside with only a little less reluctance each time.

But she visits them often, their cub, and when she's off on long journeys she sends them stories – grand tales worthy of a bard, and her letters are long and filled to the brim with her adventures. She's met Kings and Queens and the Divine herself (and Varric recognizes the Nightingale's particular flair in his daughter's storytelling as it develops), knows her mother's homeland like the back of her hand and is fearless in her thirst for new discoveries. And it's like she's six years old again and out-of-breath, recounting her most recent version of her favourite story.

Varric reads the letters out loud before the fire, Griffon old and grey at their feet and the two of them greyer still, but happy – calmer than they were and wiser. Her long legs in his lap and his eyes straining in the dim light to see the words, and her hands grabbing for the letter when he takes too long, impatient to know what happens as she's always been.  

And it's in the quiet evenings they feel the full weight of it – the world they fought so hard for, the one that's hers to live now, their wild cub, to travel and explore. There are no holes in the sky and no civil wars tearing the ground apart below her feet, and it's their legacy as much as she is.

Though it's no secret which of them they hold most dear.

**Author's Note:**

> I might expand this with short ficlets, as I have something of a weakness for kidfic.


End file.
